The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) have developed H.264 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), the video compression standard superior to the existing MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.263 standards, and have developed HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) in earnest since 2010. In a similar manner to the existing video compression technology, Test Model under Consideration (TMuC) divides an image into blocks and performs entropy encoding by frequency-transforming and quantizing a residual block by motion estimation or intra prediction. The TMuC of the HEVC performs motion estimation by using multiple reference frames, encodes reference frame indexes and motion vectors as motion information, and outputs a bitstream.
The inventor(s), therefore, has noted that there is a need for a video encoding and decoding method that can efficiently encode and decode the motion information by deciding whether to encode the motion information by merging, based on pre-encoded information, when performing encoding by merging the motion information.